Graham-Cassidy would shift money from states that have successfully implemented the ACA to non-expansion states and then ratchet down the block grants.

Time to call the Senate again.

We need to run out the clock to 12:01 October 1, 2017 at which point the healthcare reconciliation instructions expire. Encourage Senate Democrats to submit bills to the CBO for scoring so that they are back-logged and can not rapidly score anything that needs to be scored for reconciliation. Call and encourage the Sanders budget team to go to town with the Parliamentarian. 24 days need to be burned.

After a dramatic series of failed Senate votes in July, there’s one repeal-and-replace plan for the Affordable Care Act left standing. Trump is pushing for a vote, per Politico, and John McCain has announced his support, but the bill has yet to gain significant traction.

The proposal, crafted by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), essentially turns control of the health-care markets over to the states. Rather than funding Medicaid and subsidies directly, that money would be put into a block grant that a state could use to develop any health-care system it wants. It also allows states to opt out of many ACA regulations. “If you like Obamacare, you can keep it,” Graham has said, using a common nickname for the health-care law. “If you want to replace it, you can.”

In reality, that may not be true. The Medicaid expansion and subsidy funding would be cut sharply compared to current spending, going to zero in a decade.

“You can’t actually keep the same program if your federal funding is being cut by a third in 2026,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And even putting aside the cuts, she said, the block grant structure would fundamentally change the health-care landscape. “[Funding] is capped, so it wouldn’t go up and down with the economy,” when fewer or more people become eligible for subsidies.

These demons continue to want to take away healthcare from the most vulnerable. We must pick up the fight against them once again.Call your Rep and Senators

When Republican and Democratic leaders headed to the White House on Wednesday for a meeting – a negotiation – on the debt ceiling, government funding and disaster relief funding, few had expected its outcome. The Republican leadership had publicly and summarily rejected Democratic demands to extend the debt ceiling for only three months.

Republicans wanted an 18-month extension of the debt ceiling, particularly so that they could work on their tax cuts without having to be rudely interrupted by a fiscal cliff. They also wanted enough wiggle room to forget about the Dream Act with no leverage left for the Democrats. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi knew this, and they wanted to hold onto their leverage on both taxes and immigration.

…………………………..

But that’s not what happened. Donald Trump, by all accounts to the astonishment of the GOP leadership and his own Treasury Secretary, quickly accepted the Democratic offer,
then took off on Air Force One to North Dakota, taking with him North Dakota Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp. Ryan, McConnell, and other Republicans were shell-shocked.
Democrats now have what they want. They have neutralized Trump’s own threat of a government shutdown without funding for his wall, they have knocked a powerful GOP leadership, and they have rolled the Republican agenda along with the Republican president.

How did this happen? Conservatives are fuming, and the media is still trying to understand. But I suggest that the roots of this had been sown in events of the past eight months, as well well as the prior eight years. Republicans essentially rolled themselves. Donald Trump essentially had no choice but to cave to Democrats, because Republicans created this path.

We know who he is. We know that he is the type of black man
to carry and continue a vendetta against Colin Kaepernick; a grudge so freakin’ bizarre that Whitlock thought dressing up Christopher “Kid” Reid from Kid ’n Play in Kaepernick Afroface
for a skit was a good idea. We know that he exists in a singular bubble of low information and ill-fitting hats, and that he frequently escapes from said bubble to say strange things about hip-hop and Serena Williams’ weight.

But why is he who he is? How did he become such a paranoid and self-loathing weirdo? Was it a conscious choice? Or perhaps it was predestined; a fulfilling of a century-old prophesy about a man in a porkpie hat who’d emerge to deliver the hottest of takes about blackness, Ball State, feminism and barbecue.

Of course, the easiest—and perhaps the best—answer is that he is who he is because it’s financially and socially lucrative. He presumably makes in the midsix figures (perhaps more) and has been able to create a comfortable and relevant life by becoming the Black Best Friend of the White Guy Who Claims He Has a Black Best Friend and Therefore Can’t Be Racist.

“What would white people do without the nigger?” It’s a question that courses and bleeds through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President.”
It’s never asked explicitly, but it lurks beneath each point, ensconced in the piece’s premise: a fundamental and connective marrow. And it’s been with me since Sunday afternoon after I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture for the first time.

…………………………………..

We weren’t able to get there until after 2:30 p.m., which meant we wouldn’t have time to view the entire museum and eat there. (And yes, eating at their cafeteria was one of our primary objectives. Perhaps the primary objective.) So we just decided to take in the bottom two floors. Which, for those unfamiliar with the construction of the Blacksonian, are the floors devoted to America’s inception, the Middle Passage, slavery, segregation and the fight for civil rights. I’m still not quite sure how to synopsize that experience. I knew what I was going to see. And while certain facts and acts might have been new to me, none of the themes and stories present were. But it still shook me. And, now, four days after visiting the museum, the thought of it still shakes me. I am still fucked up. There were several times while reading the texts describing the horrors in the bowels of the slave ships and while seeing depictions of babies ripped away from hysterical mothers at slave auctions that I began to feel light-headed—only to realize that I was light-headed because I wasn’t breathing.

And even as I already knew of the creation of whiteness and why the creation of whiteness was necessary for those who wished to deem themselves white, the museum’s brilliant reiteration of the brutality of this intentionality was still shocking. Whiteness cannot and does not exist without the nigger. This is made plain in every picture, every voice-over, every artifact, every page, every scroll and every shackle.

The idea of a nigger existing, the metaphysical and existential presence of the nigger, the memory of the nigger, the pity of the nigger, the dread of the nigger, the loathing of the nigger, the envy of the nigger, the theft of the nigger, the threat of the nigger, the thought of the nigger and the fabricated terror of the nigger is as essential to whiteness as grain is to grits. It’s the foundation white status sits and stands on. The mattress white self-esteem lays its head on. The mirror white pride smiles at. The restorative balm white souls are soothed by. Without the nigger—without a nigger—whiteness loses its endoskeleton and collapses into dust.

Is this the woman that Michelle Obama sees when she looks in the
mirror now, free of the White House and the media scrutiny of
presidential politics? After more than a decade in public life, can she
freely shed the sheath dress and pearls for a wide brim black hat and dookie braids?

She just did.

By allowing herself to be photographed alongside 15 other members of Beyoncé’s inner circle, Obama reclaimed her image from the annals of stodgy first lady portraits. And, she did it by embodying Beyoncé’s.

The image, in case you haven’t seen it, is part of a birthday tribute to the singer who posted portraits of black women — some famous, others not— dressed in one of her iconic looks from the “Formation” video.

Irma: Airline ticket prices surge up to 600% as incoming hurricane sparks mass evacuations
The airlines contend that they have not changed their fare structures

Flyers hoping to get out of Florida before Hurricane Irma makes expected landfall later this week are encountering large hikes in airline prices, and expressing dismay that they’re being charged extra in their attempts to get out of the storm’s path.

As Irma approached, breaking records in the Atlantic and hitting Caribbean islands, would-be ticket purchases were outraged on social media, calling out the airlines for what they perceived as taking advantage of a potential natural disaster.

“Shame on you @delta. Jacking from $547 to over $3200 for people trying to evacuate properly?” Twitter user Leigh Dow wrote with an accompanying picture that showed an alert for the price change. Ms Dow was retweeted tens of thousands of times.

The gouging going on is criminal. Between gas, water and now this. Also I wanted to check in on SG2 and other 3Chics Texans caught up in Harvey. This business of Hurricanes stacked up 3 deep in the Atlantic like this….arrgh. God help us all.

Why did President Trump shock Republicans and official Washington by abandoning his own Congressional leadership and cutting a debt-ceiling deal with Congressional Democrats? To review, Trump abruptly agreed to a Democratic proposal for a three month debt ceiling extension tied to Harvey relief aid. Democrats were so stunned they tried to go as lo-fi as they could with their victory lap, fearful that any overt celebration would prompt Trump to reconsider. This late Times report confirms that even Trump’s Treasury Secretary, the husband of actress Louise Linton, was caught off guard.

……………………..

Donald Trump’s core drive is dominance. We see that in his
politics which is revanchist and destructive and in its less dire
manifestations driven by a zero sum vision of human and economic
relations. For me to win, you have to lose. The more fluid and
collaborative aspects of human interaction seem entirely lost on Trump. This is why he is the leader of the revanchist, racist far right.

But the political or ideological manifestations are secondary to the
personal one. Trump needs to dominate people. Clearly Trump felt that McConnell and Ryan are not serving him well enough or loyally enough or both. So he lashed out or tried to damage them. Schumer and Pelosi were simply the most convenient cudgels available.

I don’t say this to discount the two Democrats’ savvy in pulling this off. I think they managed quite a coup. I just think that’s the true driver. It’s not clear to me whether Trump doesn’t realize that he hurt himself as much as he did Ryan and McConnell or whether he does realize it and simply doesn’t care. The core take remains the same. Trump’s core personal drive is the need to dominate. It’s been clear for weeks that he feels routinely betrayed by these two men. They don’t produce for him. They embarrass. They fail to defend him. The need to dominate runs deeper than any policy agenda or ideological ambition. People who are driven by the need to dominate are also often self-destructive. None of this is
surprising.

Rosalind Brewer Is Brewing Up History As The First Woman And First Black COO Of Starbucks
Brewer will be in the number two position behind the CEO

SEATTLE (Sept. 6, 2017) – Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) today announced the appointment of Rosalind Brewer as group president and chief operating officer, effective Oct. 2. Brewer, former President and CEO of Sam’s Club and current Starbucks board member, has more than 30 years of management experience and more than 10 years of experience leading multi-national retailers

“Starbucks is a culture-first company focused on performance and Roz is a world class operator and executive who embodies the values of Starbucks. She has been a trusted strategic counselor to me ever since she joined our board of directors, and I deeply value her insight, business acumen, and leadership expertise. Roz is the right leader to help us realize our greatest of ambitions in this next chapter of our journey,” said Kevin Johnson, Starbucks president and ceo. “I am honored that Roz is joining Starbucks in this capacity and playing an important role with an accomplished team of senior leaders that reflects the strength and diversity of our organization.”

Brewer will report to Johnson and serve as a member of Starbucks senior leadership team. She will also continue to serve on the Starbucks board of directors. As group president and chief operating officer, Brewer will lead the company’s operating businesses across the Americas (Canada, U.S. and Latin America), as well as the global functions of supply chain, product innovation, and store development organizations.

Black Girls Rock!

Flickr Photos

Potus Takes Oath of Office

Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China

My Brothers Keeper

AFRO PUFFS

Most Adorable Shoe Stealer

Six Little Babies

Fatherhood

Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.